A Plea for Eros

commitment to the work of piecing together a past. Simple nationalism or chauvinism for a “people” is beside the point. The archive provides information on fools as well as on heroes; it documents both hardy pioneers and those who died or went mad from homesickness. There is a story of a farmer who thought the flatness of the Minnesota land would kill him if he looked at it any longer; unearthing rock after rock, he built his own mountain in memory of the home he had left. My mother felt a natural sympathy for this man, and when a huge rock was dug out of her own yard in Minnesota, she kept it. It’s still there—her “Norwegian mountain.” When I worked with my father on the annotated bibliography of that archive, I began to understand that his life’s work has been the recovery of a place through the cataloging of its particularity—a job that resembles, at least in spirit, the Encyclopedists of the eighteenth century. By its very nature, the catalog dignifies every entry, be it a political tract, a letter, or a cake recipe. Though not necessarily equal in importance, each is part of the story, and there’s a democracy to the telling, I think, too, although my father has never told me this, that his work has been for his own father, an act of love through the recovery of place and story.
    I remember my grandfather as soft-spoken and, as with my grandmother on my mother’s side, I remember his touch. It struck me, even as a child, as unusually tender. There was no brusqueness in him, and 1 remember that when 1 showed him my drawings his sober, quiet face would come alive. He chewed tobacco, and he offered us ribbon candy as a special treat. He lost four fingers to an axe chopping wood, and I recall that the stubs on his hand fascinated but didn’t scare me. When I think of him, I remember htm in a particular chair in the small living room of his house. He died of a stroke the year I was in Norway: 1973. I was too far away to attend the funeral. We were not a long-distance-telephone family. They wrote me the news. I spoke to my parents once that year on the phone.

3
    My first real memory takes place in a bathroom. I remember the tile floor, which is pale, but I can’t give it a color. I am walking through the door toward my mother, who is in the bath. I can see the bubbles. I know it’s a real memory and not a false one taken from photographs or stories because there are no pictures of that bathroom and because the proportions of the bathtub and toilet correspond to the height of a small person. The bubbles fascinate me, and the presence of my mother fills me with strong, simple pleasure. My mother, who hasn’t spent much time in bubble baths during the course of her life, has always been somewhat dubious about this memory. But within this isolated fragment I see the path of my walk—the hallway, the small living area, the door to the kitchen; and when I described the walk to my mother, she confirmed that the rooms correspond to the graduate-student barracks near the University of Wisconsin at Madison. I was three.
    I have memories of that first trip to Norway, too. The most striking is one of light and color. I am sitting outside at a table with my sister and my mother and my aunt. My cousins were probably there as well, but I have no memory of them. The sunshine is so brilliant I have to squint. We are close to water. I have no idea whether it was a fjord near Bergen or the ocean off Mandal. It’s water and it’s blue. It’s probably the fjord, because I do not remember vastness or a beach but trees and rocks. The table is white, and on the table are glasses of shining soda pop—yellow and red. Those glasses of
brus
(the Norwegian word for soda pop, a word I never forgot) delight and fascinate me. I am quite sure that I’d never seen red soda before, and the memory is so powerful, I must have felt I was in the presence of a Norwegian miracle. That bottle of red
brus
on a white table gleamed throughout the remaining years of my childhood as the sign of what was possible
there.
It may have been in part responsible for the question I asked my mother when I was five or six: “Why is everything better in Norway?” I don’t remember asking the question, but my mother assures me I was tactless enough to ask it. My poor mother decided that she had framed her emigration in the wrong light and vowed to be more careful about her comparisons between the two countries in the future.
    Early memories are